>But that (or removing the antenna at all) is going to just leave you with exactly the problem you already have—it can’t make a connection, so it will continue retrying (and probably at its highest power setting) forever and drain your battery.
The majority of the power being drawn occurs because the system mistakenly believes the band is still usable and assumes that it probably just located somewhere with poor reception. This causes the system to ask the radio to bump up its radio power and when that doesn't work, wait x amount of time and then try again. However by stripping the cellular antenna, we make it impossible for the system from executing that behavior.
Sure it'd periodically wake up and inevitably fail to initiate a scan but that consume vastly less power. (to the point that it'd likely be a non-issue)
